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him, if I could. I say leave the lady here and let us fly." |
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"That would be even worse. Do you think she would hesitate a minute to put the whole castlefolk on our tails? You should have thought of that before," the timid man spat. "Let us go farther into the woods and kill them all and bury them deep. No one will know." |
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"Fool! What is the profit in that?" asked the man who had proposed the abduction in the first place. |
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"Our lives are the profit. They will not hang us for thisthey will draw and quarter us." |
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"They will draw and quarter us anyway," the "Norman bitch" man laughed. "Let us use her first and bury her after. Thus we will have a little profit. It will be no small pleasure to lay a Norman bitch. I wonder if their little holes are daintier than those of our women." |
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"That is not the kind of profit I meant, you swine." |
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"Fools! Fools! To stand here and argue about doing this or that. Let us go, I say. When we are safe off this land, then we will have time to talk of what to do." |
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Ian did not permit himself to give a single thought to Alinor. If he did, he would run mad. He concentrated instead upon each individual step of what he had to do. The cowherds had to be told to take their cattle out to pasture again and scatter them so that they could serve as bait for the reavers another time. The men had to be roused and called to arms. The huntsman was fordone. He could run no further. Wulf of the Lea must take him up to ride pillion to direct them. |
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Everything seemed to take a million years to accomplish, but Ian did not scream at his men or threaten them. To acknowledge the need for haste would break the blankness that he was keeping in his mind. Any crack in that blankness would somehow connect with what lay behind the black wall that covered his child- |
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